Jack Harrison’s U.S. Soccer Path Started With a Choice in England by His Mother

PURCHASE, N.Y. — Jack Harrison was just shy of his sixth birthday when professional scouts started calling. He was 7 when he began training with Manchester United. And he was 8 when he signed an agreement to play in the team’s youth academy.

In the working-class area of Bolton, England, where Harrison grew up, those would be regarded as thrilling early steps on a propitious path. But when Debbie Harrison, who was raising Jack on her own, watched her son bustling around the field with the other children, she saw things differently.

“There were 8s and 9s and 10s in the training area, 20-odd boys in each group, and I’m thinking, They’re only looking for one in this group, one to come through, and they’ll be happy,” she said. “It’s a factory system, isn’t it? They go into these academies, and they kind of become a number.”

The vast majority of boys who enter the top soccer academies in England never play for the clubs’ senior teams. Debbie Harrison was aware of this. She had heard too many stories of teenagers and young adults left rudderless after shouldering their parents’ dreams through childhood.

So, from her computer in Bolton, she engineered a highly unconventional move: sending her only child to the United States, where he began forging a different passageway in the game, from a boarding school in Massachusetts, to college at Wake Forest, to Major League Soccer.

This summer, Harrison has realized his professional soccer dreams — a version of them, anyway — 3,000 miles from Manchester. As a 19-year-old rookie, Harrison has caused a stir on the field for New York City F.C., tallying three goals and two assists in his last seven league games.

“It’s incredible what Jack’s mother did, a bit of foresight that now we all can see,” said Claudio Reyna, the sporting director for New York City F.C., which will play the Red Bulls on Sunday in Harrison, N.J. “She knew there was a path, a different path, for her son, which in England nobody else sees.”

The path started in Bolton. Harrison, whose parents split up when he was 3, took a train on his own several times a week after school to the training site in Manchester, where it felt as if he completed the same drill every day: receiving a ball on the left wing, accelerating down the sideline and swinging a left-footed cross into the box.

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The New York City F.C. rookie Jack Harrison was the No. 1 pick in Major League Soccer’s draft.CreditBen Solomon for The New York Times

At home, Debbie Harrison was quietly researching alternatives. She guessed his soccer talent could carry him to a choice private school and an elite education, something she had never had herself. She set her sights on the Berkshire School in Sheffield, Mass., where tuition for boarding students runs just over $50,000.

“She took what turned out to be one heck of a gamble,” said Dan McElroy, who taught Harrison physical education at Turton, a secondary school in Bolton. “People like Jack Harrison don’t often come out of towns like this.”

Jon Moodey, the soccer coach at Berkshire, vouched for Harrison, who required significant grants for four years of high school, despite having never seen him play. (Manchester United had declined to release any video of Harrison.) But Debbie Harrison gave Moodey the evaluations the club had sent home with her son every few months. They described an undersize player with a clean touch and nifty skills, but one who lacked speed and athleticism.

When Moodey expressed concern about Harrison’s small frame, his mother told him that Manchester United had conducted bone density tests that showed he would grow into a sturdy teenager.

With New York City F.C., quickness has become one of Harrison’s defining traits. After missing the first 12 games while recovering from a preseason hip injury, he has given Patrick Viera, the team’s coach, a creative threat on the right wing. His older, more famous teammates — European stars like Andrea Pirlo, David Villa and Frank Lampard — have praised his ability to change games with his quickness and daring.

Lampard, in particular, has kept an eye on Harrison. Last month, Harrison was visiting a friend’s house in East Hampton, N.Y., when Lampard, who was in Montauk with his wife, invited him and his friends to their house to watch England play its Euro 2016 round of 16 match. Harrison, who is half Lampard’s age, was struck by the gesture.

Lampard rose through the ranks at West Ham United when he was a boy. He called his young teammate’s path “very unusual” and praised Harrison’s mother for her foresight.

“You have to give credit to a parent who has a son’s best interests at heart as a whole rather than just trying to bet everything on him becoming Manchester United’s next star, which is what a lot of parents would do,” Lampard said.

Harrison moved to the United States at 14. Debbie Harrison, 49, stayed in England, where she works as a personal assistant at a law firm. “We had kind of lived and breathed each other,” she said. “My life was his life.”

Far from home, Harrison gravitated toward a small crew of surrogate guardians. They were left with vivid memories of him.

In his senior year at Berkshire School, Harrison was named the national high school player of the year (which earned him a brief, congratulatory call from Reyna, who at that point had never heard of him). But Moodey was just as impressed that Harrison had become the No. 1 squash player on Berkshire’s team and that he had set a time record on a local mountain-biking course — despite never having tried either sport in England.

During high school, Harrison also played for Manhattan Soccer Club, taking the train to New York. Ray Selvadurai, the club’s director of coaching, remembered inviting Harrison, then only 15, to watch one of the club’s under-20 games in Brentwood, N.Y., and learn about the club. Harrison ended up putting on a uniform and scoring four goals.

Bobby Muuss, Harrison’s coach at Wake Forest, recounted a more subtle moment during a practice session last fall: Facing a flock of defenders, Harrison had discovered an almost imperceptible seam and spun a pass through it using the outside of his foot. Muuss turned to his assistant coaches and told them, “I don’t think he’s going to be with us next season.”

Harrison did play only one season for Wake Forest and was selected as an all-American by the National Soccer Coaches Association of America.

In January, the Chicago Fire made Harrison the No. 1 pick in the M.L.S. draft but traded him to New York City F.C., which had been coveting him. It represented a homecoming, in a way. In order to stay close to his club team, he had spent summers at a friend’s house in Morningside Heights and formed a connection to the city. He developed an unabashed love for Times Square — much to the dismay of his friends from New York. He practiced with Manhattan Soccer Club on Randalls Island and played pickup games on the turf fields at Riverside Park.

Back in England, his friends and family teased him about developing an American accent. His mother was surprised to find a bag of pretzels, a lowly item in the English snack food hierarchy, in his car.

“It’s only been the last year or so that I’ve gotten into them,” Harrison said, laughing.

Harrison lives now in Elmsford, N.Y., a 30-minute drive to Yankee Stadium. He has remained in awe of his older teammates and has tried to stay levelheaded about his early success. His agent, Remy Cherin, has been cautiously on the lookout for any overheated hype, calling it “typical American mayhem” and saying Harrison had a long way to go.

But Harrison has accomplished one thing already: Having escaped the tunnel vision of the English youth academy system, he has highlighted an unconventional, alternative pathway for boys in Britain, one that many say provides more of a safety net than the European academy system.

Debbie Harrison said that when she removed Jack from Manchester United’s academy, coaches there had told her that they could remember only one other boy who walked away in similar fashion. But she saw soccer growing in the United States, and she had noticed a young league becoming an increasingly attractive landing spot for players.

“I told Jack then, it doesn’t matter where you are; the world is a small place now,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SP1 of the New York edition with the headline: Mother’s Choice in England Blazes Son’s U.S. Soccer Path. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe